Cynics might think end-of-year round-ups are just space-fillers for hacks who can't be bothered to hunt out new stories. But not even a teacher could imagine we'd stoop that low in Education Guardian. Week in, week out, we hold the government to account for its actions, and we set the same standards for ourselves. Last Christmas, we published our predictions for the education year ahead, so it is only right that we should now look back and see just how accurate we were.

Daring to guess the exact departure date of any minister is always a risky business. We optimistically forecast that Ruth Kelly would be out of the education job by September; not in our wildest dreams did we imagine she'd be gone by May. We would have been right to say that her farewell speech was the only time she said anything we managed to stay awake for, had we not dozed off while writing the gag. None the less, a big apology is in order for that error.

In our defence, though, no one expected Tony Blair to be in so much trouble with his education policies by the beginning of summer that he would have to sacrifice his minister before she had a chance to screw things up for herself. There again, it never occurred to us that Blair would still be at No 10 now - an oversight apparently shared by the rest of the Labour party. So Andrew Adonis will have to wait a little longer to be made a viscount in the prime minister's resignation honours list, as we predicted.

We also wrote that Tony Blair would appear "alongside John Travolta to announce a massive expansion of the academy programme in collaboration with the Church of Scientology". Obviously we were correct to imagine Labour would be happy to hook up with any crank in town to expand the academy scheme, but we should have realised the Scientologists were far too mainstream to get involved with the government. Who needs a leg-up from the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) when you can already afford your own multimillion-pound premises in the heart of London?

We were also slightly off the mark with the suggestion that the creationists would pull out of the academy programme after Labour started cozying up to L Ron Hubbard, on the grounds that they didn't think it was "appropriate for children to be forced to learn any old nonsense". Despite what the website of the King's Academy in Middlesbrough might suggest, Vardy is not a creationist and can't imagine why anyone should ever have thought he believed the world was created in six days. "Any fool can see it would take God at least seven," he now says.

It might also seem we were wrong to say that the DfES would report in June that record numbers of students had applied for university courses, thereby utterly vindicating the decision to bring in top-up fees. Don't imagine we ever contemplated anything but student numbers going down; we just didn't count on the government being unable to massage the figures to make it look as though they had increased. This unexpected outburst of honesty took everyone by surprise, and it was a relief to all when business returned to normal in September, and the DfES got its knuckles rapped for trying to bury the bad news of falling Sats scores by releasing them on the same day as GCSE results.

Naturally, we are also disappointed that the Association of Colleges decided, at the last minute, to go back on its decision to bring out a risqué pin-up calendar. This kind of failure of nerve is sadly all too symptomatic of the further education sector at the moment. Still, many thanks to the AoC's media department for forwarding us one of the few pirate copies in existence. Anyone who wants to see chief executive John Brennan making a "fantastic December stunna, dressed only in a Santa hat" should send us a stamped, addressed envelope.

We would also like to correct the statement that Sir Martin Harris, director of the Office for Fair Access, would say in February that the Offa phones were still working and if anyone wanted to call for a chat he would love to hear from them. The Offa phones have long since been disconnected and Harris can now be reached via Friends Reunited.

Marvellous prescience

Now we have got the apologies out of the way without once using the word sorry, we can get on with marvelling at our own prescience. In all other respects, we were almost 100% right. We don't want to claim any credit for predicting the government would greet GCSE and A-level results as a major triumph for its policies, or that the two main teaching unions - the NUT and the NASUWT - would continue their dignified squabbling, or that the third union, the ATL, would do nothing much that anyone noticed.

Nor can we be bothered to mention that the National Union of Students moaned about increasing levels of student debt, or that every physics department in the country finally closed. We included all these only out of a sense of completeness; they were all so depressingly inevitable that even Kelly could have seen them coming. Though obviously she didn't.

A bigger triumph was to suggest that the 20-strong Russell Group of universities would continue its relentless pursuit of global dominance by obtaining its own premises and appointing its own director-general, though we did expect the job would go to Digby Jones. But he decided to become the government's skills envoy (whatever that is), and the PM'S policy stooge, Wendy Piatt, became chief exec of the Russell Group instead. So you can take it as read that the cap on top-up fees is as good as lifted. Still, at least Sir Richard Sykes will not now have to threaten to use Imperial's nuclear capability against Luton to get his own way.

Stroke of genius

It wasn't too difficult to guess that Boris Johnson would show as little interest in higher education as he has in any other political issue, but it was a stroke of genius to recognise that the conservative leader, David Cameron, would not get round to replacing his shadow minister no matter how embarrassing he became. So congratulations to Johnson for keeping his job and congratulations to us for understanding that complete ineptitude is no hindrance to a career in the modern Tory party.

But even this is dwarfed by our biggest coup - revealing a private memo from the DfES to primary heads reminding them that phrases such as "da baby in da crib" and "Herod was well wicked" were banned from nativity plays. As everyone will now know, 2006 is the year in which Christmas has officially been outlawed by the forces of political correctness - and you read it here first. So try to overlook the fact that you've just been made to read it again.